Voting turnout in Greece: expressive or instrumental?

DASKALOPOULOU, EIRINI (2018): Voting turnout in Greece: expressive or instrumental?

Abstract

Voting turnout is a core element of political democracy as it constitutes the so-called hard evidence of citizens’ engagement in the wider political processes. Thus, increasing voting abstention rates in the developed countries and the emergence of abstract types of political and civic engagement raise concerns over the ways in which participation evolves in modern democracies and the underlying socio-political mechanisms and dynamics that govern its development. Within this context, we analyse the micro-level determinants of voting turnout rates in Greece using ESV data for the 2002-2011 period. In particular, we test for the effects of formal and latent political participation, activism and trust as pointing to either an expressive or instrumental voting decision process. After controlling for the individuals’ socio-demographic and economic profile evidence is found of instrumental voting in Greece. Important policy level implications arise as a result of these findings.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: voting turnout; political participation; activism; trust; economic crisis; Greece
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D72 - Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior; H - Public Economics > H1 - Structure and Scope of Government > H11 - Structure, Scope, and Performance of Government

References

Alogoskoufis, G.andPhilippopoulos, A.(1991) ‘Political Parties, Elections and Inflation in Greece’,CEPR Discussion Papers 547, CEPR Discussion Papers.

Baltas, N.C. (2013) ‘The Greek financial crisis and the outlook of the Greek economy’, The Journal of Economic Asymmetries, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 32-37.

Bellucci, P., Lobo, M.C.& Lewis-Beck, M.S. (2012) ‘Economic crisis and elections: The European periphery’, Electoral Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, pp.469-471.

Birch, S. (2018) ‘Democratic norms, empirical realities and approaches to improving voter turnout’, Res Publica, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 9-30.

Bitros, G.C. (2015) European Union failures in Greece and some possible explanations. In: G.C. Bitros& N.C. Kyriazis (Eds) Essays in Contemporary Economics (pp. 3-22). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Bitros, G.C. (2013)‘From riches to rags or what went wrong in Greece’, Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 5-39.

Bitros, G.C., and Karayiannis, A.D. (2013) Creative Crisis in Democracy and Economy. Springer Science and Business Media.

Blais, A., and Dobrzynska, A. (1998) ‘Turnout in electoral democracies’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 239-261.

Bollen, K.A. (1980) ‘Issues in the comparative measurement of political democracy’,American Sociological Review, vol. 45, pp. 370-390.

Bollen, K.A. (1990)‘Political democracy: conceptual and measurement traps’, Studies in Comparative International Development, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 7-24.

Ceron, A. and Memoli, V. (2016)‘Flames and debates: do social media affect satisfaction with democracy?’,Social Indicators Research,vol. 126, no. 1,pp. 225-240.

Cox, D.D. and Snell, E.J. (1989) The Analysis of Binary Data (2nd ed.). Chapman and Hall.

Dahl, R.A. (1984) Modern Political Analysis, 4th ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Dahl, R.A. (1982) Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, New Haven, Yale University Press.

Danopoulos, C.P. (2017) ‘Civil liberties and rights, equality and the quality of democracy in Greece’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 225-242.

Daskalopoulou, I. (2018a) ‘Satisfaction with democracy and social capital in Greece’, International Journal of Social Economics, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 614-628.

Daskalopoulou, I. (2018b) ‘Civic participation and soft social capital: evidence from Greece’, European Political Science, pp. 1-18, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-017-0114-y.

Ekman, J. and Amnå, E. (2012) ‘Political participation and civic engagement: towards a new typology’, Human Affairs, vol. 22, pp. 283-300.

Feddersen, T.J., andPesendorfer, W. (1996)‘The swing voter's curse’, The American Economic Review, vol. 86, no. 3, pp. 408-424.

Flickinger, R.S., and Studlar, D.T. (1992) ‘The disappearing voters? Exploring declining turnout in Western European elections’, West European Politics, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 1-16.

Franklin, M.N. (2001)‘How structural factors cause turnout variations at European Parliament elections’, European Union Politics, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 309-328.

Freire, A., and Lobo, M. C. (2005) ‘Economics, ideology and vote: Southern Europe, 1985–2000’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 493-518.

Fukuyama, F. (2014) Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. Macmillan.

Fukuyama, F. (2001) ‘Social capital, civil society and development’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 7-20.

Gastil, R.D. (1987) Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civic Liberties, 1986-1987, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press.

Geys, B. (2006)‘Explaining voter turnout: A review of aggregate-level research’, Electoral Studies, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 637-663.

Greene, W. (1997) Econometric Analysis, Prentice-Hall International, NY.

Grönlund, K., and Setälä, M. (2007) ‘Political trust, satisfaction and voter turnout’, Comparative European Politics, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 400-422.

Hewitt, C. (1977) ‘The effect of political democracy and social democracy on equality in industrial societies: a cross-national comparison’, American Sociological Review, vol. 42, pp. 450-464.

Hosmer, D.W. and Lemeshow, S. (2013) Applied Logistic Regression. New York: Wiley.

Jackman, R.W., and Miller, R.A. (1995)‘Voter turnout in the industrial democracies during the 1980s’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 467-492.

Karp, J.A., Banducci, S.A, and Bowler, S. (2003) ‘To know it is to love it?’,Comparative Political Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 271-292.

Klingemann, H-D. (1999) Mapping political support in the 1990s: a global analysis. In: P. Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government (pp. 31-56), Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Lane, J.E., and Ersson, S. (1990) ‘Macro and micro understanding in political science: What explains electoral participation?’, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 457-465.

Lewis-Beck, M.S., and Nadeau, R. (2012) ‘PIGS or not? Economic voting in Southern Europe’, Electoral Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 472-477.

Lijphart, A. (1999) Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lipset, S.M. (1959) ‘Some social requisites of democracy; economic development and political legitimacy’, The American Political Science Review, vol. 53,no. 1, pp. 69-105.

Marozzi, M., (2015)‘Measuring trust in European public institutions’, Social Indicators Research, vol. 123,no. 3, pp. 879-895.

Matsusaka, J. G. (1995) ‘Explaining voter turnout patterns: An information theory’, Public Choice, vol. 84, no. 1-2, pp. 91-117.

McFadden, D. (1974) Conditional logit analysis of qualitative choice analysis, In:Zarembka P. (ed.), Frontiers in Econometrics, Academic Press, NY,pp. 105-142.

Munck, G. L. (2016) ‘What is democracy? A reconceptualization of the quality of democracy’, Democratization, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 1-26.

Munck, G.L. and Verkuilen, J. (2002) ‘Conceptualizing and measuring democracy: evaluating alternative indices’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 5-34.

Nagelkerke, N.J.D. (1991) ‘A Note on a General Definition of the Coefficient of Determination’, Biometrika, vol. 78, no. 3, pp. 691–2.

Nezi, R. (2012) ‘Economic voting under the economic crisis: Evidence from Greece’, Electoral Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 498-505.

Norris, P., (2001) Making democracies work: social capital and civic engagement in 47 societies, No. rwp01-036.

Pantazidou, M. (2013)‘Treading new ground: A changing moment for citizen action in Greece’, Development in Practice, vol. 23, no. 5–6,pp. 755–770.

Papagiannidis, S., Coursaris, C. K., andBourlakis, M. (2012) ‘Do websites influence the nature of voting intentions? The case of two national elections in Greece’, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 300-307.

Powell, G.B. (1986) ‘American voter turnout in comparative perspective’, American Political Science Review, vol. 80, no. 1, pp. 17-43.

Putnam, R.D. (1995) ‘Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital’, Journal of Democracy,vol. 6, no. 1,pp. 65-78.

Schmitter, P.C. and Karl, T.L. (1991)‘What democracy is … and is not’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 75-88.

Sobbrio, F., and Navarra, P. (2010) ‘Electoral participation and communicative voting in Europe’, European Journal of Political Economy, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 185-207.

Talò, C. and Mannarini, T., (2015)‘Measuring participation: Development and validation the Participatory Behaviors Scale’, Social Indicators Research, vol. 123, no. 3, pp. 799-816.

Voulgarelli-Christidou, C. (2016) ‘Dangers of an urban crisis within the European Union: fuelling xenophobia and undermining democracy’, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, vol. 15, no. 1–2, pp. 236–245.

Wooldridge, J.M. (2002) Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data, The MIT Press, MA.

Yamagishi, T., (2001)‘Trust as a form of social intelligence’, In K.S. Cook (ed.), Trust in Society (pp. 121-147), Russell Sage Foundation, New York City, New York.